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Thoreau's Maine Treks Still Relevant

December 04, 2007 - Forty miles of mythical water spread to the north out of Greenville, drenching northern Maine in a crisp, cool bath. Walter Macdougall stands at the head of Moosehead Lake, looking at all that water before him, finding a connection to words penned in dog-eared journals a century and a half ago.

Macdougall, a retired teacher living in Milo, thinks about the world Henry David Thoreau found on an expedition to the Maine woods and Thoreau's search for himself in the isolated and powerful wilderness of Maine.

"How do we keep the best we have in a civilized world, the very best that we have," Macdougall wonders, "and still keep hold of that which ties us into something really very fundamentally important?"

One hundred and fifty years ago, Thoreau made the last of his three trips to northern Maine during the same year in which the first of three of his essays about the region was published. Together, though not intended to be one work, the essays became known as "The Maine Woods."

"Ktaadn" detailed his first trip to the area, when he ascended Mount Katahdin after traveling by canoe up the West Branch of the Penobscot River in 1846. Seven years later, a moose hunt led him on a canoe trip from Moosehead to Chesuncook Lake, a trip recounted in "Chesuncook," and his final trip came in 1857, when an arduous expedition led him into the Allagash by way of Moosehead and the East Branch of the Penobscot. That work would be known as "Allegash and East Branch." Though the pieces have been grouped together, Thoreau's death in 1862 pre-empted him from ever editing the essays into one complete work. The three trips that inspired Thoreau's "Maine Woods" took place over a 12-year period, and he spent some 15 years working on the essays.

Today, many people believe "The Maine Woods" is as relevant as it ever was. In large part, northern Maine is as Thoreau found it -- remote and wild, full of rugged isolation and stunning natural inspiration. Thoreau sought those settings as a means for personal reflection, as people still do in the 21st century.

"(Thoreau) thinks we need a place to get back to where we can find what is primal and good within us," Macdougall said."That takes a sort of resonance with nature itself. We have to have a place to concentrate on the lessons nature is giving us."

This summer, Maine Woods Forever, a nonprofit group dedicated to marking Thoreau's travels across northern Maine, unveiled a map detailing the author's three distinct expeditions. But the map is not a map in the sense that it's an easy one to follow, or that enthusiasts should somehow be expected to retrace Thoreau's footsteps. In fact, says Maine Woods Forever board member Paul Johnson, of Oakland, it would be nearly impossible to do so.

"Those routes are still doable, but this isn't like the Appalachian Trail," said Johnson, a retired fisheries biologist who worked for nearly four decades in the Greenville area. "We're not saying sign, 'into a book and go do this. ... It's not necessarily to encourage what Thoreau did, but it's to recognize that he traveled this way, and where he traveled."

At the heart of it, Thoreau climbed Katahdin so he could see the world around him from such an impressive peak. He paddled through to Chesuncook Lake to serve as witness to a moose hunt, something that intrigued him.

"He was very much a pioneer," said Richard Judd, a professor of environmental history at the University of Maine. "He was one of the first to see wilderness in terms of it being something other than something that should be hacked away for putting in farms or cutting down trees for lumber. He was one of the first people to see wilderness as having inherent value."

Johnson has spent a great deal of his life on the West Branch of the Penobscot River, both at work and at play. Macdougall, who grew up in Bingham, has spent more time on Mount Katahdin and on Moosehead Lake. In fact, he's doesn't know the West Branch well at all.

Of course, the lives of those two men detail the wonder of "The Maine Woods" perfectly -- exhibiting just how difficult it would be to know all of the areas in great detail and underlining how much Thoreau's works have to offer. It also speaks to the relevance of the essays.

"You can still go to places he went to and find the conditions much the same as he found them," Johnson said. "That's quite remarkable -- and it's a remarkable set of circumstances that led to that. Over 150 years, how many places are still the same as they were?"

Judd puts it in context for the 21st-century outdoorsman.

"This is a period where a naturalist like him -- and, at some degree, he would have thought of himself as a naturalist -- they would travel thousands of miles," Judd said. "They would put a pack on their back and head into the American West and cover five or six thousand miles. It was not unusual for people in that time period to do these incredible trips by foot and canoe. It's Lewis and Clark stuff."

"It all comes back to the notion of what wilderness means. We see it as having inherent value. In the 1840s, this is a totally new thinking that somebody would love to find isolation in nature."

"The Maine Woods" hardly qualifies as summer reading. It is long and tedious, even for literary scholars. Macdougall pointed out that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 million different words contained in Thoreau's personal journal entries.

"The work itself is Thoreau speaking to us, and Thoreau speaking to us is worth listening to," Macdougall says "The figures of speech he uses, the turn of a phrase. There are 2 million words there, but a lot of those words are chosen very purposely."

"I think it's a delightful read," Judd said. "I love the way he uses metaphors -- I think in the mid-19th century was a totally foreign idea for many people. ... There was also a very subtle difference in how he saw wilderness as opposed to how we see wilderness today. That has a lot of value."

Macdougall first seriously entertained Thoreau's works in 1967, tying them into transcendentalist viewpoints in the time of the Civil War. Recently, as a board member of the Moosehead Historical Society, he returned to Thoreau and began to paint for himself a far different picture of the man.

On the one hand, Thoreau is best known for his thoughts as he conveyed them into words. On the other, his transcendalist lifestyle left him as something of a scientist, perhaps accounting for the great detail of nature in his journals.

"It's a person trying to find himself. Just that alone, it's a good thing for us to learn," Macdougall said. "I would love to have known Thoreau, and the closest thing we have to knowing him are his journals."

Not that Macdougall can't find a little bit of Thoreau on the edge of magnificent Moosehead Lake.

"(Thoreau) thought, himself, quite strongly, that it was very difficult to appreciate where you were because you didn't get a chance to see very much, and that's my feeling, too, sometimes," Macdougall said.

"But that's when I feel closest to him, when I'm standing at the foot of Moosehead Lake or at Northeast Carry or have a chance to see Katahdin.


SOURCE: Kennebec Journal

DATE: 12-02-2007


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